Kai Hocknell

My journey with photography started at a young age when I would capture photos using a Kidizoom camera, taking it with me wherever I went. The enjoyment of taking photos of near enough anything has stayed with me all these years, allowing me to experiment with all sorts of genres.

Since then, I have always had a strong desire to push the limits of what photography can do and see what my equipment can capture. Countless hours’ worth of experimentation with my images has led to the unique style of photography I enjoy producing.

I’ve experimented with light and exposure lengths throughout all my projects, whether they surround Portraiture, Landscape or more recently in my Astrophotography. This latest genre has been of particular interest to me due to my love of astronomy since a young age. My work has been known to take grand scales, delving into deep questions and philosophies which aim to capture the viewers’ attention and to have them engage in these points as well.

For this project I wanted to investigate one of the biggest questions that humanity has ever posed to itself: What’s the point?

Space constantly gets linked to existentialism, with how impossible it is for the human mind to fully comprehend the size let alone the complexity of the universe that surrounds us.

Through multimedia installation, my project critiques the cultural and social significance of “The Golden Record” – a time capsule of images sent into space by Nasa with the ambition to represent humanity. Through appropriating imagery from the Golden Record and overlaying it with my own deep space imagery, I aim to forge new connections between scientific meaning and cultural representation. I however believe there have been some glaring omissions from the selection of images meant to “represent humanity” that I have retroactively added through my projection.

For most of my deep space imagery I have chosen to embed parts of the images from The Golden Record where I felt there was a connection between the two. In these I am making the link between earth and the rest of the universe, and where our place is within the vast cosmos.